False Prophets: Science

Science is the systematic approach using reasoned speculation, structured observation, and rational analysis to build knowledge about a complex subject in the natural world. It has been credited with saving lives and being instrumental in making possible the complex infrastructures that make our present day, comfortable standard of living possible. It is the savior that many today believe will further ease man’s suffering and possibly even make men immortal.

Today, many look to science to provide answers to difficult and previously unanswerable questions instead of the traditional approach of looking to religion. Science has been adopted as a belief system by some who want what they consider to be a rational alternative to religion. This ascension of science to a belief support institution has not necessarily been good for science. 

 

As a belief system, science attracts the trust of non-scientist followers. Non-scientist followers are very much like religious believers. They don’t really understand science, but they have come to trust it in some cases with an almost blind faith. This trust has market value, and this market values has a very corrupting tendency. Now that science has been elevated to a belief system it faces many of the same challenges that have already corrupted religion.

Today, there are many indications that large numbers of people are not as ardent believers in science as there used to be. These people are not just the religious who feel disenfranchised by science attacks on their religions. They are regular people who don’t believe in vaccinations, climate change, pharmaceutical industry integrity, dietary recommendations, and many other things where scientific opinion had previously been very respected. Some of the respect that had been earned by centuries of diligent and rigidly quality controlled work has been fritted away by shameless profiteering and twisting of facts for other selfish or misguided motives.

A lot of these people have stopped blind faith believing in science quite frankly because there are many products delivered in the name of science these day that are no more than worthless marketing dribble and are just not worth believing. The truth is that science is a methodology devoid in itself of any claim to integrity or respect. The working scientists generate this integrity and respect by virtue of the diligence they maintain while applying this methodology in their work. A number of integrity problems exist such as:

The integrity of science is today in question because of the corrupting influence of business and because some researchers have simple lost their personal integrity for petty, selfish reasons.  Oversight, the great purifier of scientific research, is in great peril to the point in some cased it is virtually none existent. Any scientific inquiry without effective oversight is highly questionable, likely even worthless.

Science today is in a never ending marketing mode. Any science that has not figured out how to achieve commercial success is just one funding cycle away from becoming extinct. Sometimes this need for funding supersedes the need to maintain integrity.  Science is frequently misrepresented. For example, 24 hour news likes to promote science stories because of the commercial appeal, and frequently, they misreport with fractious and misleading information for this commercial value.

Some people believe (or at least used to believe) that science is on a constant search for things that will improve our existence, but that archaic notion is wrong today. Typically, big corporation are deciding where science should and should not go as they look for the next big thing to sell or some piece of marketing to help sell things already in place. Certainly, there are individual scientist who care about things, but the corporations that employ most of them care only about profit. As a result, many important issues for humanity are never investigated like the orphan drugs because they would have a low return on investment.  

 

Being a belief system has not been a positive experience for science.  Some scientists relish the thought that some revere them. This reverence equates to a personal prestige and possibly of favorable consideration for funding, but more importantly, it equates to relevance.   In some cases, more time is spent trying to be revered than being right.

 

The history of science is highlighted by its real standout individuals who were only interested in being right.  The obsession with being right is why they ended up being revered many times retrospectively because their insistence on being right was a more difficult path. Real science can only be about getting at the truth, and the only thing that matters in that regard is being right.

Science without the proper oversight, peer review, and independent verification is susceptible to the same corrupting influences that have corrupted religion. Some people will continue to believe in science no matter what, but many will only continue to believe in science if scientists are consistently policing their ranks to purge all bias and demanding the highest quality product that can be achieved. 

 

This purging of bias and emphasis on the highest quality product unfortunately is not happening enough today and so the confidence erodes. Science today cannot be graded as a whole. It has to be taken piece by piece because the integrity of the work is a direct function of the person/group doing the work.

I can say that I do believe that science can be used by scientists of high integrity in a properly controlled environment of peer review and oversight to build complex understanding of observable things and phenomena, but I cannot say that I believe in science. The important distinction here for me is that the first assertion contains the proper, required caveats that the latter does not. The implications of this very subtle distinction are surprisingly far reaching.

Jesus and the Gnostic Tradition

Modern day Christianity is a good example of backsliding from aggressive knowledge acquisition to rigid, structured dogma. During the course of early Christian development, a seismic transition in approach occurred in a blatant attempt to exploit this emotional dependency. This stark transition is clearly apparent in the early history of Christianity's evolution to become a religion.

The central figure in all variations of Christianity is the great teacher Jesus Christ who purportedly traveled around teaching through sermons that promoted doing good deeds and loving each other. He never personally wrote any of these things down, but the things that he said were later recorded by others who had seen him. These second-hand accounts were the only written record of his teachings and even evidence of his existence.

The first organized religion to congeal around this example of Jesus after his death was a variety of forms of Gnosticism. Gnosticism at that time was a thread of spiritual thought running through various iterations in the Mediterranean region espousing a knowledge of the Divine via direct experience. The Gnostics believed that the material world was created by a supreme being, and that a portion of this supreme being was trapped within the human body which could only be liberated by the accumulation of gnosis (aka knowledge).

Gnosticism was a collection of ancient religious ideas and systems that emphasized personal experimentation and practice to acquire knowledge without any reliance on religious dogma. In gnosticism, gnosis is an esoteric mystical knowledge of transcendence that is acquired by way of internal, intuitive means and that salvation is the result of this knowledge of the divine. It was prominent around the Mediterranean basin around 200 CE existing in conjunction with early Christian movements and ideas emerging from the middle stage developments of the Greek philosophy of Plato.

Gnostic writings contain some sayings attributed to Jesus that exhibit similarities with modern Christian canonical sayings. Other of these sayings attributed to Jesus are strikingly different. For example, canonical sayings talk about the coming of an end-time while the Gnostic sayings describe a kingdom of heaven that is already here, not a future event. The Gnostic tradition was a theology of mysticism wherein the kingdom of heaven exists in the here and now. Some believe the Gnostic sayings were recorded nearer to the time of Jesus’s death and are thus closer to the source of the teachings of Jesus.

Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the Gnostic and modern Christians is the perceived path to salvation. The Gnostics believed salvation was earned by diligently seeking knowledge while the modern Christians believe salvation is a reward for dutifully keeping the faith in spite of adversity. Modern Christian scriptures attribute the words ‘seek and ye shall find’ to Jesus. These word seem to more support the Gnostic belief that requires an active process of seeking rather than the passive process of simple believing the things we are told.

This specific change in spiritual approach occurred with the second organized religion based on Jesus when the Roman empire adopted a Christian religion of the own. Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He declared religious tolerance for Christianity in the Roman empire and called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE which was the first of many effort where the modern Christian beliefs were officially defined hundreds of years after the death of Jesus. Some contend that Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was inspired more by political expediency than spiritual revelation. This proclivity for political expediency still exists in modern Christianity.

These decided revelation by the church became the beliefs that the faithful would be forced to believe. In these newly emerging Christian beliefs, the individual focus on peace, love, and knowledge was shifted in a direction more conducive to the accumulation of power, control, and wealth by the church and its administrators. Groups, such as the Gnostics, responsible for the competing lines of thought were aggressively persecuted to near extinction.

The Cathars were a form of Gnostic belief in 1200 - 1400 CE France that were limited in size because they were not proselytizers. The Cathars were wiped out by French royalty and Catholic Church armies during the Albigensian Crusade. The ruthless brutality of this crusade was captured in the words spoken by a crusade commander when asked by his soldiers how to identify Catholics from Cathars in a town known to be home to both. He replied "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" ("Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own").

What remained of the Cathars after this Catholic Church crusade were absorbed into some of the early Protestant sects who themselves went on to have a contentious relationship with the Catholic Church. Religious involvement in what should be political affairs of state has a very corrupting influence on that religion, and a religion’s proclivity to proselytize new followers and heavy reliance on dogma are symptoms of this corruption. The objective of politicized religion is an effective marketing strategy for the acquisition and management of follower to the benefit of the religious organization. This politicized religion is a low overhead, high-profit margin business that enjoys the benefit of tax shelter.